1. OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS
How to Lose the Brain Race
By STEVEN CLEMONS and MICHAEL LIND
Washington
IS the United States importing too many immigrant physicists and not enough immigrant farm
workers?
You might think so, to judge from two provisions that Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of
California,
added to the comprehensive immigration reform package that just fell apart in the Senate.
Senator
Feinstein insisted that the bill call for some fees for foreign students applying to study at
American
colleges and universities to be doubled, and also demanded that agribusiness get the right to
1.5 million
low-wage foreign guest workers over five years. Combined, the two proposals sent a message
to the rest of
the world: send us your brawn, not your brains.
Whether Senator Feinstein's amendments will resurface in any reconstituted legislation on
immigration
reform remains unclear. But her priorities reflect in many ways those of Congress as a whole.
Congress
seems to believe that while the United States must be protected from an invasion of educated,
bright and
ambitious foreign college students, scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, we can never have
too many
low-wage fruit-pickers and dishwashers.
In making immigration laws, Congress caters to cheap-labor industries like agribusiness and
sweatshop
manufacturing while shortchanging the high-tech, high-wage industries on which the future of
the
American economy depends. Witness the Senate bill's provision to admit 400,000 temporary
workers a

2. year, or roughly four million a decade, in addition to the 12 million mostly low-wage illegal
immigrants
already here, many of whose status would be legalized. Few if any of those guest workers
would go to
universities, corporate campuses or innovation clusters like Silicon Valley. They would head
straight to
restaurants, hotels and plantation-like farms.
While the United States perversely tries to corner the market in uneducated hotel maids and
tomato
harvesters, other industrial democracies are reshaping their immigration policies to invite the
skilled
immigrants that we turn away. Britain is following Australia and Canada in adopting a points
system that
gives higher scores to skilled immigrants with advanced education and proficiency in English.
British,
Page 1 of 3Canadian, German and even French universities are overflowing in undergraduate
and graduate
enrollment as they absorb the foreign talent that America is repelling.
Whereas Senator Feinstein fears that foreigners are snatching places at American universities
from
deserving American students, the fact is that our universities are weakened when fewer talented
international students enter their programs.
In recent years, skilled immigration to the United States has been accommodated chiefly by the
H-1B visa
program. But like all guest-worker programs, the H-1B program pits American workers against
foreign
workers lacking full legal and political rights. Because H-1B workers depend on employer
sponsorship to
remain in this country, unscrupulous employers can blackmail them into working longer hours
for lower
pay than American workers. Skilled workers admitted under a points system, by contrast, would
be able to

3. quit their employers in the United States and find new ones at will without risk of deportation.
Will admitting more immigrants drive down the wages of American workers? That may be true in
unskilled jobs, since there is a fixed number of bedpans to be emptied and restaurant meals to
be cooked
in the United States.
But it isn't necessarily true for skilled workers, at least not in the long run. That's because more
talent
means more innovation and opportunities for all, immigrant and native alike. The growth
economist Paul
Romer has spoken of the prospector theory of human capital. The more prospectors there are,
the more
likely it is that some will find gold. As the history of Silicon Valley and other tech centers proves,
brain
work migrates to where the brain workers are. It's a kind of Field of Dreams in reverse: You will
build it, if
they come.
Even if a skill-based immigration system did reduce incomes for the elite, that would not be the
end of the
world. For a generation, college-educated Americans have enjoyed a seller's market in
professional
services and a buyer's market in the labor of landscapers and nannies. If skilled immigration
were
increased while unskilled immigration were reduced, the wages of janitors would go up while the
salaries
and fees of professionals would fall, creating a broader middle class and a more equal society.
The United States can always use another Albert Einstein or Alexander Graham Bell. But with
the vast
pool of poorly paid, ill-educated laborers already within our borders, we do not need a third of a
million
new ones a year.
What the space race was to the cold war, the "brain race" is to today's peaceful global economic

4. competition. The comprehensive immigration reform America needs is one that slashes
unskilled
Page 2 of 3immigration and creates a skill-rewarding points system modeled on those of
Australia, Britain and
Canada. In encouraging skilled labor, Congress for a change might perform some of its own.
Steven Clemons is the director of the American Strategy Program at the New America
Foundation.
Michael Lind is a senior fellow there.